books and ebooks

I’m still doing a lot of work reading on it, and I’ve mostly stopped converting pdfs to Kindle format. My eyesight is good enough to read the tiny print, although with effort, and it’s worth it not to have the footnote showing up in the middle of a sentence and the tables totally scrambled.

I love it for the metro and for traveling light. The ability to be stuck on the tarmac and buy the next book on your to-do list is definitely worth it. (As far as I see, this is the only downside of the wifi only version of the Kindle. I wonder when someone will figure out a way to let you download books onto the kindle using a cell phone.)

Most of the books I read are still print, because most of the books I read come from the library.

Kindle editions of new hardcovers are a lot cheaper than list price, but typically only a few bucks more than Amazon sells them for. I think I want to to take Tana French’s new book, Faithful Place, with me on vacation, but am leaning towards buying it in print so I can pass it on to my mother.

As I read more fiction on the Kindle, I’m surprised at how annoying I find it not to be able to easily flip back to the previous chapter to remind myself of who a character is. Ebooks are more like scrolls than books — and there’s a reason no one reads scrolls anymore.